Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy

Samir Haddad

Publication Year: 2013

Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy provides a theoretically rich and accessible account of Derrida's political philosophy. Demonstrating the key role inheritance plays in Derrida’s thinking, Samir Haddad develops a general theory of inheritance and shows how it is essential to democratic action. He transforms Derrida’s well-known idea of "democracy to come" into active engagement with democratic traditions. Haddad focuses on issues such as hospitality, justice, normativity, violence, friendship, birth, and the nature of democracy as he reads these deeply political writings.

Title Page, Series Page, Copyright, Dedication

Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations

Acknowledgments

First, thanks to David Michael Kleinberg-Levin, who, from the very beginning,
provided excellent guidance and support, giving extensive feedback on everything
he read. I owe an enormous amount to Penelope Deutscher, an inspiring philosopher
whose influence on me is hard to measure ...

Introduction: Derrida’s Legacies

Upon Jacques Derrida’s death in October 2004, obituaries appeared, memorials
were held, conferences were convened, and at least twenty-eight academic journals in
disciplines across the humanities published special issues dedicated to his memory.
Surveying the published record, one is struck by two dominant themes. ...

1: The Structure of Aporia

Despite the many different topics on which he writes, and the large diversity of authors
he reads, Derrida’s texts return the reader with insistence to what seems to be the same
logical structure. This structure goes by various names, including undecidable, double
bind, double constraint, aporia, contradictory injunction, antinomy, and process of
autoimmunity. ...

2: Derridean Inheritance

Providing a general account of Derrida’s understanding of inheritance is not
straightforward, for although the theme appears across the entirety of Derrida’s oeuvre,
it does so with varying degrees of importance and weight. In the majority of Derrida’s
texts it operates subtly, lightly—the words “inheritance,” “heritage,” “heir,” “legacy,”
and so on are found in all sorts of discussions, ...

3: Inheriting Democracy to Come

Although it is plausible to read an implicit negotiation of political themes across
Derrida’s oeuvre, as he and many commentators have claimed, this is harder to maintain
for the specific case of democracy.1 For democracy was absent in name from Derrida’s
writings for a long time. It only started appearing regularly in his work in the
early 1990s, ...

4: Questioning Normativity

I have advanced an interpretation of Derrida’s writings arguing that inheritance
can be understood as a democratic action. Inheritance here is taken not to mean just
any reception of the past, but a particular strategy of engagement in which the aporias
in traditional democratic thought are exposed and amplified. ...

5: Politics of Friendship as Democratic Inheritance

I argued in Chapter 3 that Derrida theorizes democracy such that inheritance is a
democratic act. To be democratic, one needs to inherit. This interpretation, however,
left certain questions unanswered. First, given the tension between Derrida’s diagnosis
of a fundamental ambivalence in the structures underlying democracy and his simultaneous
support for democracy, ...

6: Inheriting Birth

In “The Reason of the Strongest,” Derrida again takes up the question of fraternity,
this time in relation to the work of Jean-Luc Nancy. The possibility of this reading had
been raised in a long footnote in Politics of Friendship, where Derrida questioned the
appeal to brotherhood in the inheritance of the Nietzschean understanding of community
by Bataille, Blanchot, and Nancy (PF, 46–48/PA, 56–57). ...

Conclusion: Inheriting Derrida’s Legacies

The point that my analysis reaches at the end of the last chapter may seem far from
the central concern of this book. On the face of it the themes and figures of maternity
and the mother, of matricide and the monstrous child, have little connection to
democracy. ...

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